again and found herself craving a cigarette for the first time in forever.
The cues were still internalized; she just hadn’t been exposed to them
in a long time.
Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the
environmental cues reappear. This is one reason behavior change
techniques can backfire. Shaming obese people with weight-loss
presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result many
people return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating. Showing
pictures of blackened lungs to smokers leads to higher levels of
anxiety, which drives many people to reach for a cigarette. If you’re not
careful about cues, you can cause the very behavior you want to stop.
Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the
feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because
you eat junk food, you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel
sluggish, so you watch more television because you don’t have the
energy to do anything else. Worrying about your health makes you feel
anxious, which causes you to smoke to ease your anxiety, which makes
your health even worse and soon you’re feeling more anxious. It’s a
downward spiral, a runaway train of bad habits.
Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cue-induced wanting”: an
external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit.
Once you notice something, you begin to want it. This process is
happening all the time—often without us realizing it. Scientists have
found that showing addicts a picture of cocaine for just thirty-three
milliseconds stimulates the reward pathway in the brain and sparks
desire. This speed is too fast for the brain to consciously register—the
addicts couldn’t even tell you what they had seen—but they craved the
drug all the same.
Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to
forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your
brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go
unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting
temptation is an ineffective strategy. It is hard to maintain a Zen
attitude in a life filled with interruptions. It takes too much energy. In
the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-
run, we become a product of the environment that we live in. To put it
bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits
in a negative environment.